Press kit JJL relu - La maison rouge

Jean-Jacques Lebel
Insurrections
curator: Jean de Loisy
with Sandra Adam-Couralet
As a foundation set up by the contemporary art collector Antoine de Galbert, la maison rouge looks with
interest at private collections and the questions they raise by once a year showing works from one
individual's collection. This autumn, la maison rouge turns to Jean-Jacques Lebel, a multifarious,
accumulating, assembling artist and, in his own way, collector.
Since 1955, Jean-Jacques Lebel has been exhibiting, writing, filming, publishing, coordinating and taking
part in collective actions. First and foremost an artist, he is also an organiser of international events,
exhibitions and festivals, a poet, theorist and political activist. None of the forms his life as an "inspired
agitator" has taken can be dissociated from his work as an artist.
This exhibition presents works born from the imaginings of this artist, conveyor and preeminent figure of
avant-gardism over the past fifty years.
Beyond its obvious meaning, Insurrections has other implications that span the political and the poetic,
reality and its representations, reflection and the most diverse languages. In an attempt to sketch the
existential portrait of this insurgent, this polysemic title encompasses Jean-Jacques Lebel's own work, that
of his friends and companions, and the objects of art and combat he has gathered and which fuel his
subjectivity.
The exhibition is divided into themes. Each corresponds to Jean-Jacques Lebel's obsession with the
enigma which a work and the wider context of its emergence raise. Happenings, Insubordination, Poetry,
Hallucination, Eros, Dada, War and Rhizome are some examples. Through these interconnecting
ensembles, visitors can engage with some of Jean-Jacques Lebel's major installations, works of primitive
art, works by anonymous artists and others by such important allies as Johan Heinrich Füssli, Giuseppe
Arcimboldo, Louise Michel, Fourier, Ravachol, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Otto
Dix, André Breton, Francis Picabia, Antonin Artaud, Bernard Heidsieck, Erró, Antonio Saura, Konrad
Klapheck, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, Camilla Adami and Orlan: some three hundred works in all which
continue to engross the artist in an earnest and endless dialogue.
Insurrections celebrates the radical subjectivity of an uncommon individual. It focuses on the intense and
continuous exchanges that take place between art and life, research and mediation, self and tribe. Notions
of discipline and classification cannot contain the work of Jean-Jacques Lebel. His is a mind in action,
fuelled by the thoughts and creations of every era and civilisation, undeterred by boundaries and
conventions.
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